From where should your sales letter sell?

I will let you in a secret about sales pages you might not know…

Even if you do, repetition never hurts.

But before that…

Trains are a waste of time. Did you know that?

They go fast, but they usually stop every couple of minutes and most of the time they are late too. I’m talking 10, 20, 30 minutes late.

And since I travel a lot…

I try to make the best of it.

That was my goal a couple weeks ago too when I was trying to get some good use to my time and ended up listening to a Ken McCarthy talk.

At one point he talked about something I was already familiar with(likely you are too):

“Headlines do not sell”

Nothing new. Or so I though.

He went on saying that the first sentence isn’t selling either. Ditto the next one. And ditto all the elements until the last 1/4th of your letter(or at whatever length you start selling).

They are not for selling the prospects on the product.

They are simply preparation.

Now that clicked and cleared some things up.

Your sales letter’s job is to sell. But not from the headline. Not from the first sentence, and not even from the 11th sentence.

That’s all set up.

Preparation so that once you get to the point of selling… your prospect will be inclined and will want to follow your lead straight into buying.

That’s it.

But you are not selling until you get to your offer and start asking for a sale.

I think you get it by now, and the reason I shared it is this:

It cleared up just another bit of the fog that floats around the whole concept of copywriting for me and I just got a step closer to understanding it better. I hope it does the same for you…

Because if you don’t understand something, you have nothing.